1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic data storage and retrieval. More particularly, the present invention relates to indexing technology including creation, organization, maintenance, and use of search indexes to accomplish the desired searching and data retrieval.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic data/document storage and retrieval applications are relatively common. In fact, the Internet revolution has resulted in incredibly huge amounts of data being stored and retrieved using various application software, including database software, search engines, and browsers. Despite the incredible increase in the amount of data available, as technology advances consumers are continuing to demand increasingly speedy access to that data.
Many factors have contributed to the industry's success at delivering increased access speed to data. For example, technological advances have been realized with higher capacity and smaller physical storage devices, faster communications technologies, various system software algorithms involving caching, Cookies, data compression, multiple buffering, etc., and advanced application software algorithms involving data storage and retrieval.
However, data transfer rates between a computer memory and other devices such as a display monitor, a printer, or another storage device, are still limited due to physical I/O requirements. For example, there is a huge disparity in the speeds of I/O versus the speeds of executing instructions in memory, and this disparity affects data searching and sorting. Searching for data commonly requires multiple disk seek operations, wherein the read heads of the disk readers must be physically positioned to the proper sector of the disk to read the required data. This is true even if the searched data is already sorted, and such disk seek and read operations are extremely time consuming relative to any substantive operations performed on the desired data in a computer memory.
Additionally, the Internet revolution has led to widespread use of open data formats such as HTML and to a lesser extent currently, XML, and these data formats are widely used to present information to end-users. Nonetheless, many computer applications typically create the desired presentation pages dynamically only after retrieving the desired data to occupy the pages. Some computer applications use templates which require insertion of only certain data dynamically, whereas other computer applications dynamically create entire HTML pages for presentation. In either case, the overall data presentation time for end-users is affected. Thus, systems and methods are desirable for storing, retrieving, and displaying data in a widely-accepted open data format such as HTML, wherein the I/O involved in locating desired data is reduced and the presentation time to the end user is also reduced.